


Halfway Home

by welkinalauda (iiii)



Series: Salvaged from Tumblr [16]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s12e03 The Foundry, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 23:10:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20016322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiii/pseuds/welkinalauda
Summary: A fragment, on where Mary went after she walked out at the end ofThe Foundry,all alone in her future.





	Halfway Home

Up the stairs. Out the door. Two miles' walk into Lebanon proper. 

She takes John's ring off the chain and puts it back on her finger. She needs the protection.

She asks nicely at the general store while stocking up on Kotex, and scores a lift to the nearest Greyhound stop from the clerk’s boyfriend’s mother. The woman witnesses to her the whole way. They part in Hays, promising to pray for each other.

She calls the angel from a pay phone. (First she has a theatrical moment of sticker-shock and has to go for more quarters. Then she calls the angel.) She tells his answering machine to check in on her… on the boys. 

Decision time. Now that she’s _away_ , where does she _go_?

Not Lawrence. Nothing left there but charred memories. Not any of her family’s places; those will have passed into other (trigger-happy) hands, or stand derelict. 

She flips to the annotated list of addresses in the back of John’s journal - a list that’s not in John’s handwriting - and… there. That one. That’ll do.

She calls the angel two days later from Spokane. Two days after that, he helps her break in to the cabin in Whitefish.

Yes, she says when he asks. You can tell them where I am.

She got a lot of reading done on the bus.

The truck in the shed runs well enough to get her in to town and back.

The supermarket’s a trip. More sticker shock, of course. She’s getting to be braced for that. But there’s unidentifiable plant-things in the produce section, no butcher behind the meat counter, and the freezer aisle has become a frosty international bazaar.

She gets herself a pint of vanilla caramel fudge swirl.

Two days later, she knows she’s bought far too much food. She’d never been on her own before, not really, and she got enough to feed the family she used-to-have for a week. After the bout of tears brought on by that thought, she goes to call the family she has now. The phone doesn’t work. After _that_ bout of tears, she drives back to town.

She can’t find a pay phone. There _used_ to be a pay phone on every other corner. There was a pay phone at that truck stop back in Kansas. But here she can’t find a pay phone. No pay phone, so no phone book, so no way to find the address of somewhere that’ll help her make the mobile phone work again… not that she’d know what to look under, if she had a phone book to look in. She gets a grip on herself (because crying three times in as many hours is just too much) and tries to think. 

The library, she decides. They’ll have a phone book.

The librarians are bemused by the request. She nearly bursts into tears again, and insinuates that she’s recently escaped from a cult. One of the librarians takes pity on her. He tells her what she needs is called a ‘charger.’ He sets her in front of a computer and helps her not only find the nearest store that carries the right brand, but shows her how to map the way there. He gets called away to answer someone else’s question and there she is, alone with a search engine. 

There were some things she hadn’t quite wanted to go looking for on the boys’ computer, in their home… but it’s different here, in a public library. She looks up her parents’ last address. Click, click, zoom, zoom, and she’s looking at the house her mother died in. It’s a different color, and a couple of trees are missing. Click, zoom, there’s the house she died in herself. Click, click, there’s the high school she went to. Zoom, zoom, and she can’t get closer than an aerial view of her parents’ cabin. There’s a visible hole in the roof. She looks up her friends’ old houses, which leads to looking up her friends, which leads to obituaries, all obituaries. She starts working through the people on her hunting phone tree, and they’re all gone too - some in splashy crime scenes, some just vanished. The roadhouses and specialty shops she used to frequent have all closed up. 

Everyone who knew her is dead.

She writes down the directions to the charger store and bolts out of the library without stopping to thank the librarian. She needs to talk to that angel.


End file.
